Page 25 of Evil at the Essex House
“I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Schlomsky. Miss Schlomsky didn’t tell me where she was going or when she was returning.”
I hadn’t seen Flossie this morning. I hadn’t seen her yesterday either, although Crispin had said he’d done. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen her since I’d delivered that telegram two evenings ago.
“Did you say you’d sent a telegram?” I asked the Schlomskys.
They both stared at me, startled, but after a moment, Hiram Schlomsky nodded. “We did, young lady. We crossed from New York to Southampton on the RMS Berengaria, and spent a night at the Star Hotel before we came up here to London yesterday. We telegrammed Florence from Southampton the first night. We assumed she would come and find us at the Savoy when we got here, and when she didn’t, we decided to give it a night. And now here we are.”
He spread his hands. Or at least he spread one, the other still held the walking stick. The head was shaped as some sort of animal, I saw. Something monstrous and curly with horns, perhaps a yak or a bison.
“I think I saw your telegram arrive,” I told him. “Or at least I sawatelegram arrive. I was the one who brought it upstairs to her. Did it begin with the wordsurprise?”
They both nodded. “We didn’t tell her we were coming,” Hiram Schlomsky rumbled. “We haven’t seen her since she left Toledo last fall. We wanted to surprise her.”
“Well, unless someone else sent a telegram that began withsurpriseon the same day, it got here. I stood right in front of her when she opened it.”
“Then she should have come and found us,” Mrs. Schlomsky said, her tone somewhere between peevish and worried.
I nodded sympathetically. “I’m not sure why she didn’t, but she was alive and well as of yesterday evening. I haven’t seen her myself since the telegram arrived, but Christopher saw her later that evening, and Crispin saw her yesterday. Lord St George.”
I exchanged a glance with Evans, who nodded. “Your daughter was on her way out at the same time as Miss Darling’s cousin last evening. That was the last time I saw her, as well. The door is locked at eleven, when I go off duty. She must have come in after that.”
Or not come in at all, although of course I wasn’t insensitive enough to actually say that.
“Perhaps you’d be so kind as to open the door to her flat for us, Evans?” I asked. “I’m sure Miss Schlomsky would want her parents to be as comfortable as possible while they wait for her.”
Evans hesitated, and I added, “They’re probably the ones paying for it, you know.”
Flossie hadn’t a job, so her parents’ fortune surely provided her rent and spending money, in the same way that Uncle Herbert was the one paying for Christopher’s and my flat and our allowances. Evans would have let Uncle Herbert up with no questions asked if my uncle were to show up here and wanted to go upstairs. Evans had even sent Uncle Harold up without announcing him just a month or two ago, and Crispin’s father had nothing whatsoever to do with the financials for the flat. In justice to Evans Uncle Harold is, of course, a duke, and his son and heir had been crashed out in my bed at that point, so there were mitigating circumstances.
And no, it wasn’t the way it sounds. I slept on the Chesterfield in the sitting room that night, in case you somehow got the idea that we’d been sharing. Naturally, that was what Uncle Harold had been worried about. As if sharing a bed with me could have ruined his son and heir any further than Crispin had already ruined himself.
“Of course,” Evans said. “One moment.”
He disappeared behind the counter to dig out the keys to Florence’s flat. I turned to the Schlomskys and smiled politely. “I trust your trip to London was uneventful? And you’re staying at the Savoy, you said?”
They nodded.
“I had dinner there just last night,” I said brightly. “And tea the day before. Lovely place, isn’t it?”
“It’s adequate,” Sarah Schlomsky informed me, as if it was likely that Toledo had anything better to offer.
“No trouble on the ocean voyage, I hope?”
“A bit of bad weather south of Greenland,” Hiram Schlomsky said with an expansive wave of his cane. “Nothing to worry about.”
Indeed.
By then, Evans had returned, jingling Florence’s keys enticingly, and we headed into the lift. “Florence and I live on the same floor,” I explained as the lift took us up two stories. “She’s to the left down the hallway and I am—we are; I share a flat with my cousin—to the right, but Florence and I see one another rather frequently going up and down. And she’ll knock on our door occasionally and come in for a drink.”
“A drink?” Mrs. Schlomsky said blankly. She glanced at her husband.
I nodded. “Cocktails are rather the thing among the younger set here in London. It might be different where you are from. Florence tried to explain to me where it’s located. The mid-west, she said?”
I had absolutely no idea where the mid-west might be—somewhere in America, obviously, although Flossie’s directions had made no sense whatsoever. One of them had included the words, ‘drive west for eighteen hours,’ which would have put us in the middle of the Atlantic if we had tried to do it from here—but it sounded rather corn-fed. Millions of dollars aside, the Schlomskys might not be familiar with London society, or any other society, either. There might be no society to speak of in Toledo.
“Our daughter doesn’t drink,” Sarah Schlomsky said, as the lift doors opened and Evans got busy pulling the grille back from the opening.
I opened my mouth, and closed it again. Of course Flossie drank. I had watched her do it, in my very own flat. I had also seen her come home rather giggly on more than one occasion.
